#lets start the book again but i take a shot for every thematic inconsistency and pass out before Jonathan even meets the count

[cascadiums]

Bram Stoker really made a point of the Count hoarding old money in his bedroom like a dragon, the spoils of war and empire guarded by the upper class, just for his heroes to bribe their way across Europe funded by their inheritance from a revolving door of dying parents, huh

[hakasims]

Shitty Luca Movie Recap, Episode 4

Can’t Watch Nina, Even For Luca?

Don’t Worry, Me Neither. Goodbye.

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..

...

Ok, fine, I’ll talk about the damn thing.

So it’s a warm September night, and I’m in the mood for a Luca Marinelli feature. In my infinite wisdom I choose Nina. “It’s directed by a woman,” I reason, “and women know what’s up.” ‘What’s up’ in this particular case is code for ‘how to frame beautiful men for the female gaze’. Because women can be auteurs, too, and being an auteur means making movies about your own personal wank material.

Turns out, sometimes a woman’s wank material consists less of a gorgeous male form and more of fascist architecture. We’ll discuss the former in due time, but for now, what’s Nina even about? Well, at its core it’s a simple story about a young woman who doesn’t know what she wants, set against the backdrop of the Rome that is almost entirely empty due to most people leaving for the summer. This could have been a fairly straightforward coming-of-age film, but Nina is too indie and up its own ass for that. Literally nothing of note happens in this movie, and it’s all long static wide shots of empty streets, endless stairs, and domineering largeness of Rome’s most famous fascist buildings such as the Palace of Italian Civilization, the Sapienza University of Rome, Palazzo dei Congressi, and, most prominently, the Fountains Hall. (Google what they look like if you don’t know.) Now, I’m guessing those locations weren’t chosen by accident. They could have easily added to the creepiness of the movie — and I’m assuming creepiness was intended; otherwise how do you explain these hoverboarding nuns?

Anyway, the employment of the locations could have been atmospheric and thematic had the shots not been so bland. But they are. Bland, flat, and always looking the same no matter what is happening in the scene. Usually audiences are willing to sit through slow uneventful movies because of interesting visuals or characters worthy of attention, but Nina has neither. The titular character herself is tedious. Even her bad fashion sense is bad in a boring way that doesn’t tell you anything about her. Is she stuck in perpetual adolescence? Is she searching to get in touch with her sensuality? Who knows. The only thing I’m certain of is that she needs to learn to tuck her tops into her bottoms.

Nina spends her days giving singing lessons, going to Chinese calligraphy classes, eating cake, exercising and taking midnight walks in the empty city. She wants to go to China in September — it’s the closest thing to a goal she has — yet she’s done no preparations, and instead of learning Mandarin she’s studying calligraphy. And she’s real bad at it, too.

There are reoccurring visual elements in the movie besides the vast emptiness: stairs, white columns, a jogger, a red dress, animals… You’d think those were very straightforward symbols, but they’re used too sporadically and inconsistently to hold any meaning. For example, animals. Nina is tasked with both helping out in a pet store and house-sitting an apartment with a German shepherd (a good boy named Homer), a guinea pig and a tank full of fish. The instructions she’s given are absurd, like feeding the dog sleeping pills and putting the guinea pig on a diet. And then there’s a supposedly American TV show always playing in and out of diegesis about dogs living in cages and swimming happily in pools, and it looks and sounds like a video off the political section on the dog version of YouTube. It contains timeless classics like “You are a dog born in the age of consumerism” and “Depression is an evil illness now spreading amongst dogs of every breed, dogs belonging to every social class.” The butter commercial from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend could never. And I wish the whole movie was as surreal as this TV program but unfortunately it’s as bland and directionless as Nina herself.

And boy is it directionless. There aren’t any subplots in the movie, no cause and effect, no acts, no structure, no flow; only scenes that happen, and I can’t even find any reasons for the order in which they happen. The scenes also don’t start or end; they just interrupt each other, not leaving any emotional impact. For example, there’s a scene where Nina sees her future self. She’s on one of those midnight walks with the good boy Homer when she sees a couple being romantic. The woman is wearing a long red dress, and the man is in all black. The shot is wide, so it’s impossible to see their faces, but the woman is obviously Nina:

And the man is definitely Luca. I recognized his ass. I’m not joking, guys. It’s his ass:

Also I was later directed to the website of the photographer who took the set photos, and yes, it’s Nina and Luca.

I never forget an ass.

Anyway, Nina, who at this point hasn’t properly met Luca’s character, Fabrizio, sees herself from the future acting romantic with him, and doesn’t react. We don’t even know if she recognizes herself or him or whether it’s even a real scene or a dream. How are we supposed to empathize with a heroine who isn’t allowed to react to her environment?

Whatever, it’s time to talk about Fabrizio. He plays the cello and he’s obnoxious. That’s it. He first appears as a patron of Caffé Palombini, the real-world café Nina frequents (and buys her cakes at). She’s drinking her usual milk shake and reading. At some point, their eyes meet, but neither says anything, and then Nina gets up and runs after the good boy Homer who decided to take a little stroll by himself. She leaves all her things behind: her milk shake, her handbag, at least three books, a whole stack of paper for calligraphy, and her diary. It’s obvious she’s going to come back as soon as she gets the dog. And yet before her feet are even out of frame, Fabrizio gets up, goes to her table and fucking steals her diary!

His next several appearances are random and sporadic, and it looks like he’s stalking Nina, but by the time of his first actual scene she is following him for some reason. Obviously, he can’t let a woman outcreep him, so he ambushes her:

He tells her blankly, “You’re following me,” but I think this scene deserves better dialogue. Thankfully, we have a whole well of predator/maiden media to pull from.

Though I personally believe this is the most appropriate line:

Fabrizio lets Nina know he has her diary in the dickiest way possible: he quotes from it to let her know that he’s read it. He then informs her that he’ll only give it back to her if she continues following him. And it’s not blackmail; “it’s an agreement.” What an asshole! I’m weeping for the dignified cuckoldry of Joseph.

And what was the purpose of that “agreement” plot point if the next time they meet is by chance? Quirky love interest writing, duh. So quirky that the accidental meeting happens when Nina is walking past a phone booth where Fabrizio is… doing a phone prank? I don’t know, I got nothing. Anyway, he’s annoyed their meeting is unintentional on Nina’s part, but he returns her diary, and I guess they start dating? He watches her sing once with what could only be described as a complete absence of emotions:

In the next scene she watches him play the cello after which they go on a date. Nina is wearing the red dress from the vision, but Fabrizio’s shirt is different. I fucking give up.

Their next (second?) date is a romantic dinner on Nina’s roof, and they’re dancing for entirely too long. She then tells him she’s scared of how much she’s enjoying his company, gives him a ridiculously chaste kiss goodnight and… completely ghosts him afterwards. And if you didn’t dislike Fabrizio before, you will now as he starts calling Nina at ungodly hours (including 5:30 am) and leaving her very whiny and increasingly more passive-aggressive, entitled, and accusatory voicemails. At some point he even leaves a voicemail for the fucking dog! He’s like, “Homer, I’m worried, meet me at the café.” Again, quirky love interest writing: extortion, phone pranks and a voicemail for a dog.

Fabrizio then lets Nina know he’ll be leaving town in three days in case she’d like to see him one last time or whatever. And she never fucking does! In any other movie she’d be chasing through the airport, but here she just drops him like he’s a well-tucked shirt! She tells the kid she’s befriended (she hangs out with an eleven-year-old boy the whole movie, don’t worry about it) that she’s afraid to be “like everyone else”, with a job and a boyfriend, so she doesn’t even say goodbye to Fabrizio. At some point she goes for a walk with the good boy Homer, and Fabrizio is also there, and they just miss each other. Even fate isn’t interested in that romance.

And then all the fascist buildings get covered in gigantic paper figurines, and the red-dressed Nina runs into Fabrizio’s arms. Because of course.

Nina is one of those movies where the main theme — a struggle to grow up — is obvious, but the rest of the elements are a mess only the writer-director could decipher. And I don’t really care. Again, I had to read Japanese postmodernists at university. What I do care about is the male form I mentioned at the start. I know I have no one but myself to blame for my expectations of how the director should have framed Luca’s body or face, but it’s one thing to frame him blandly and a completely different thing to isolate him as the only character (or actor) she’s deeply uninterested in filming competently. Everyone else in the movie gets their fair share of close-ups and decent lighting whilst Luca — whose name is literally second in the credits — gets, um, neglected.

This is his introduction:

These are literally all his close-ups:

Should I even count this last one? What’s with the lighting? Like, this is as well-lit as his face gets:

Oh, the shot is too wide and you can’t see his face properly? Well, tough poop:

Are you kidding me with this shit?

Nina may not be objectively the most terrible of the movies Luca’s been in: I’d argue both Mary of Nazareth and L’ultimo terrestre are worse, as is Slam, whose time’s a-coming. Nor is it the movie where Luca appears the least (The Great Beauty’s literal one minute of screen time is saying hi). But it’s the only movie I have no reasons to watch: it’s blandly shot, poorly structured, badly themed — and it’s actively obstructing Luca’s beauty and charisma. So no matter which film you’ll ask me to do next, at least in terms of the visual component of my posts, we have nowhere to go but up.

[ahouseoflies]

The Best Films of 2016, Part V

Here is Part I. Here is Part II. Here is Part III. Here is Part IV. And this is finally the end. I wrote about some of these films already in quarterly reports, and I copied-and-pasted the same blurb in this space. GREAT MOVIES 23. Oasis: Supersonic (Mat Whitecross) It's a good sign if any music documentary makes you go, "Wait, should [subject of this documentary] be my favorite band? Have I been completely wrong this whole time?" For purely musical reasons, one being the band playing "All Around the World" perfectly after being together for three weeks, Supersonic is a must-see. Mat Whitecross's control over the pacing is maybe the star here: The film wisely speeds through Oasis's (admittedly short) rise and elides the fade out of relevance altogether. If most bands fall in the same way, if Oasis had a uniquely tumultuous period of fame and fortune, let that be the main thrust of the narrative. There are no rules here. It helps that, besides recording almost everything that happened to them, Liam and Noel Gallagher have the self-awareness, honesty, and insight into their own abilities and reputations that I wish every rock star had. Supersonic is, after all, a story about brothers in a family way more than it is about brothers in a band. 22. Indignation (James Schamus) Indignation, which is surprisingly James Schamus's feature debut, seems theatrical. In the sense that every single scene matters, especially the ten-minute show-stopper between Logan Lerman and Tracy Letts, in the overlit design that makes everything look like the half-remembered dream that it is. But also in the sense that the events are only scratching the surface of what they're supposed to represent. It has proper resolution, but you also get the sense that it could go on and on, circling its own tail of sexual repression and generation gap and Judaism as religion and culture. It's a pensive, personal monument of an artist who is only nominally involved with the film. 21. Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids (Jonathan Demme) During the final leg of the final song of the final show of his two-year tour, Justin Timberlake gets overwhelmed. He's leading the crowd in a clap during the breakdown of "Mirrors," and he stops the overhead motion for two beats to cover his mouth. He looks as if he's appreciative and triumphant enough to cry. It's the type of honest moment that Demme specializes in capturing--something too natural to fake. Unless Timberlake is faking. Unless he's so studied in performance that even that breakdown is part of the act. What we're witnessing is either the most genuine performer possible or the most calculating, but if he's hitting the marks so exactly...does it matter? Even when he's trying to defer, ("Do you want something to drink? Eat?") Timberlake is front and center, and the spotlight suits him. He's happy to be the goof, the guide, the leader, but most of all, the professional. I don't know how you'd take this movie if you weren't already a fan of his, but I don't think anyone can deny how much he wants you to enjoy yourself.

20. Aquarius (Kleber Mendonca Filho)  Aquarius is a shaggy dog, and it would be easy to quibble about the prologue or a scene here or there that could be trimmed. But as characters do with the film's irascible protagonist, you have to give in to its routine in order to appreciate it. The cumulative effect is definitely worth it. Aquarius isn't in the business of declaring Clara's emotions, but those emotions are always clear, either from Sonia Braga's performance or from the consistency of writing. Even when Clara appears selfish--which is often--Filho makes you grapple with her rather than softening her. At the same time, Braga, who is in almost every scene, walks a fine line that keeps the character from being crusty. In the character's breakfast nook, there hangs an original, folded, oversized poster of Barry Lyndon. Who knows where it came from or who tracked it down. Besides automatically making me like the character, the poster reveals how much thought and effort went into crafting the space around Clara, the fully-realized world that she refuses to leave without a fight. So much of the character is built from unspoken details that build and build, and that importance of environment is exactly what the whole thing's about. 19. Captain Fantastic (Matt Ross) Captain Fantastic splits the difference between a specific portrait of a family and a more allegorical take on parenting without sacrificing either of the two approaches. For the first forty-five minutes or so, we're just getting acclimated to the family's ecosystem, and it's so fascinating that I would have been happy if that were the whole movie. But plot does intrude, and some of the expected things happen. (I'm fine without any more scenes of someone faking a heart attack so that his confederates can steal.) That zanier stuff is always grounded by each character's individual arc though, and the movie is in love with so many of the lessons and books and philosophies that the patriarch teaches. If someone were to update those Syd Field books on classical screenwriting structure, I might include this script, which has not only perfect inciting incident and act breaks but also a determined, driving resolution. There's a version of this movie that ends on the flush at the airport (and a version that combines one or two of the child characters), but the one we have should put writer/director Matt Ross on the map. 18. Cameraperson (Kirsten Johnson) This documentary is a bit demure at first about the type of statement it's making. While capturing the landscape shot that frames the opening credits, Kirsten Johnson sneezes, making her camera shake. It's cute, but it seemed like the most crude description of this piece: one of a series of outtakes. A celebration of humanity is what it really was. Purely visual, Cameraperson seduces the viewer with a full portrait of one of those terms that is difficult to define but that you know when you see: a citizen of the world. Although we barely hear her or see her face, we get a sum of Johnson's sacrifice and empathy through the disparate parts of what she has filmed. I gravitated more toward the elliptical scenes--a montage of execution sites didn't work for me at all--but I was grateful to see such a unique type of memoir. 17. Arrival (Denis Villeneuve) The first hour is almost perfect: A gut-wrenching prologue gives way to the arrival of the UFOs, which is eerily patterned after the confusing experience of piecing together 9/11 on the day of. After Adams and Renner meet in a vintage Spielberg scene, since Villeneuve is inspired by people you've never heard of and people everyone has heard of, there's a lot of empathetic, you-are-there walking down hallways. The dividing line seems to be a montage narrated by #RennerSeason that is as hackneyed as it is necessary. At a certain point, this has to be a movie, not just a mood piece. Forest Whitaker, doing some kind of Baltimore pirate accent, and Michael Stuhlbarg, fondling his phone clip, are almost a literal reminder of that as the impatient military presence. That little bit of cartoon doesn't subtract from the emotional punch that the film packs in its bookends though. Apparently, now that I'm a father, I'm going to be emotional mush for anything involving a child from now on. If I'm lucky, I'll keep having an artist as authentic as Villeneuve conducting those feels.  16. The Witch (Robert Eggers) An assured debut from writer/director Robert Eggers, The Witch is an absorbing creepfest that also serves as a bit of a Rorsach Test for its viewers. Is it about the dangers of isolationism? That's there. Is it a warning about denying the expression of sexuality? That's there too. But what makes the engine run, besides the quiet claustrophobia of the setting (a handful of locations, closed in even more by the 1.66:1 frame), is commitment. There's another version of this movie that isn't as grave, that gives the audience an opportunity to relieve the tension. But the film works because it takes place in a world that very much believes in witchcraft, and none of the actors are winking. The viewer doesn't have a chance to opt out. This is a very scary film, and it's because Eggers grounded it in every detail of the period that he could.

15. Hail, Caesar! (Joel and Ethan Coen) These two capitalist Jews are so good that they make you want to be a Communist Christian. Hail, Caesar! is less emotionally rich than some of the other post-No Country work, but it's still the brothers working in top form, with sincerity, affection, and invention. Being this committed means that the filmmakers are also committed to the bad ideas: the inconsistent narrator, half of the characters. The whole doesn't add up to Inside Llewyn Davis or Fargo, but there are individual scenes here that are better constructed and funnier than anything in those masterpieces. Capitol Pictures, the name of Christ figure Eddie Mannix's studio, recalls Das Kapital, the Karl Marx book, and these crossing streams would be too cute if Capitol Pictures weren't already the studio Barton Fink worked for twenty-six years ago. They've always been this good. 14. Mountains May Depart (Jia Zhangke) I didn't know anything about this enigmatic moodpiece when I turned it on, and I'm glad I didn't. When the film shifts after the opening credits (which show up at a record forty-five minutes in), I was surprised, and when it shifts again for the final half-hour, I was really ready to embrace the way each piece echoed the previous one thematically. I'm still trying to work out some of the elements--the gun symbolism, for example--but I'm starting to appreciate how the episodic nature of Jia's films can actually make them more cohesive, not less. Mountains May Depart gets literally wider as it goes to show the growing isolation of modern life, and it's partly a treatise on the complications of personal wealth in 21st century China. But really it's about the tormenting complexity of communication in all of its forms. 13. American Honey (Andrea Arnold) This is another one that I’m still digesting, but American Honey is a good example of the difference between story and plot. There's a lot of the former even without much of the latter. It's sprawling, with an adagio tempo that recalls the shifts of the road, and it's unclear how much of the film was written to begin with--I don't know how someone could write something that feels so lived in and spontaneous. It's of-a-piece with Andrea Arnold's other work, (We get a face-to-face intrusion from a bear this time instead of Fish Tank's wild horse.) but it's also much more free-form. I'm not even sure how successful American Honey is in its own goals--I kind of wish things didn't boil down to "jealous boyfriend" tropes--but it accrues so many correct choices along the way that I don't care. Witness, for example, the realistic, complex way people interact with music. When the magazine crew blares trap music in their van, it's aspirational and ritualized. They pump themselves up for the grind by listening to the same songs over and over. (And, presumably because of their poverty, they might only have a few songs.) When an upper-class teenager dances to a similar song later, she's literally using it, mimicking the transgression that our crew authentically owns. And Arnold isn't depicting that relationship caustically: It's a fact. The privileged have that "trying-on" fluidity, and the people who embody the themes of the song don't. They aren't even allowed to have that. And yo, how many times have you seen a movie in which people listen to a song more than once in the first place? Finally, full stop, whether he wants to be or not: Shia Labeouf is a Movie Star. 12. Everybody Wants Some!! (Richard Linklater) Sometimes appreciation of Richard Linklater lies in imagining the horrible movies that other people would have made with his idea or even with his script. In lesser hands, every dumb character blends together here, and as funny as the dialogue is, it amounts to nothing more than misogynistic grabass. I guarantee Hollywood is in no shortage of sports movies about a bunch of teammates who bust one another's chops. Kudos to Linklater then for making such a funny movie (especially Raw Dog and anything at all that the Plummer character says), and it's interesting to see something in 2016 that doesn't sanitize 1980 language. But he has much more on his mind here, specifically rituals, tribalism, and male competition. He seems to be interpreting the question of whether your identity is who you are when no one else is looking or who you are when everyone else is looking. Particularly when Jake's high school friend is introduced--he has become a punk overnight--that question deepens. Is Jake's willingness to hide his letter jacket in order to fit in with the team a small defeat, a hand covering his bright light? Or does that readiness to mold himself to their collective identity confirm who he is? In other words, is that his identity, and is that brand of identity what one needs to be a successful athlete? Even when there's something I don't like about his work--obvious 1980 needle drops here--I later realize that Linklater was right and I was wrong. That period of time was maybe the last opportunity for mainstream culture to be popular culture in general, and the splintering of genre that was about to occur is form matching execution, the exact conflict the characters are encountering.The film feels long, which comes with the territory of something this purposefully wandering. It's that rambling presentation, more than anything else, that makes Everybody Wants Some!! a semi-sequel to Dazed and Confused. But even though the two films end on a similar note of possibility, this one feels less deterministic. In Dazed and Confused, the characters are living in the moment because Mitch knows that "working for the city" is an eventual kiss of death. Pink knows that authority will keep creeping in on him. Though there's a literal countdown to encroaching classes in Everybody Wants Some!!, we find out that might not be so bad. Even class is an inviting possibility and new frontier. 11. Hell or High Water (David Mackenzie) This is the type of movie in which, at a crucial moment, a character's engine stalls, then, after a flash of suspense, turns over. The car isn't dead--that would be a cliche. But it doesn't fire up immediately either. Hell or High Water acknowledges its own genre trappings (and its indebtedness to No Country for Old Men), then trots past them to prove its own points about what gets passed down and what doesn't. Yeah, this film lines up with a lot of my interests; I would have been surprised if I hadn't liked southern bank-robbin' brothers and grizzled Texas Rangers. But the generation gap being analyzed by the filmmakers is more satisfying than any of those superficial interests. The Bridges character is being pushed into retirement, in part because his composition book brand of policework is outmoded. (He stakes out a bank because he reckons it's going to get robbed, and he falls asleep overnight--half out of dedication, half out of old age.) He doesn't recognize the world that has taken shape during his tenure, one that he sees as disrespecting or disregarding masculine authority. For their part, the brothers recognize authority all too well as crooked and arbitrary. The world promised to them, if they were properly masculine and abiding and respectful of their land--if they were properly Texan--has not come to pass. They rebel against the banks foreclosing on them, but the film isn't simple enough to let that be the only angle. The Chris Pine character is trying to bequeath his land to the next generation, even though the gesture offers little hope, even though the kids don't want it, because he doesn't know how else to be. You can't forge your identity with specific values, then dispense with that identity as soon as the values ring hollow. The characters reveal different degrees of fatalism, but all of the degrees seem reasonable in a West that is lawless in a different way than we've seen before. The Ben Foster role is juicier, but Pine's work as Toby is vulnerable and  specific here. While eating at a diner, he does this thing in which he cuts a piece of meat, then takes a bite from the fork, then takes a bite from the knife itself. It's a weird but thoughtful character touch, the type of thing he would get more credit for if he weren't so pretty. 10. The Handmaiden (Park Chan-wook) Late in the film there's a two-second insert shot of a watch, and the object's contrast of dull texture and shine fills the screen overwhelmingly, even after an entire film of more obviously sumptuous imagery. Even if it had no substance, if it were empty sensuality, The Handmaiden would be an aesthete's dream. But it does have substance, and it's super fun. In some ways it's a high watermark, the film that Park was born to make. As one of those "same events from different perspectives" movies that gets progressively nasty, it could have been tedious, but Park digs more deeply into his bag of advances and zooms as it goes. Many of those films are manipulative, but each of these parts is individually satisfying. And when it is manipulative, all it's doing is reinforcing its thesis: Some things are so beguiling that we want them to consume us. 9. The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos) The descriptor "visionary" gets thrown around a lot--yesterday I watched two trailers that advertised movies by "visionary" directors. But Yorgos Lanthimos actually is a visionary, a creative dreamer who shows you something you've never seen before, and he reminds you of how rare visionaries actually are. This setting is fully fleshed out, but Lanthimos is intriguingly selective about what he's willing to explain. It's tempting to believe that anyone can go, "What if there were a place that forces you to find a romantic partner, and if you don't, you turn into an animal?" But people who aren't visionaries wouldn't also think of the way people would talk in that setting (unaffected, deadpan) or the way people would dress in that setting (utilitarian, gender-conforming). I thought Lanthimos was funny in Dogtooth and Alps, but I wasn't sure if he knew he was funny. It's official: He knows he's funny. Farrell is in almost every scene, and he continues to challenge us to define what a Colin Farrell performance is. This character, though more optimistic and caring, reminded me of his role in True Detective season two: Both men are laconic, always surveying a situation with respect to every experience they've ever had. The world isn't on their shoulders, but they sure feel that way. Movie Star parts are decisive, heroic men, so it's not Colin Farrell's fault that we had him all wrong at first. In his best performances--this one and In Bruges obvi--he plays men who are endearingly helpless. Who could have ever known that when he was cast in S.W.A.T.? I'm still wrestling with this film's ideas, specifically what Lanthimos actually believes and what he's satirizing. (Is common ground as innocuous as "nosebleeds" something people can base a relationship on, as arbitrary as anything else? Or is that supposed to be false and shallow?) I liked the film less once it left the hotel that the first hour centers on. Lea Seydoux's Loner Leader is supposed to have the same glib authority as the Hotel Manager, but that corollary seems too easy for me. Here's the thing though: I want to wrestle with The Lobster. I know there's a lot of meat on the bone. I don't want Lanthimos to stay so far ahead of me.

8. 20th Century Women (Mike Mills) A dude in my row left for a few minutes to go to the bathroom, and when he got back, had he asked, I wouldn't have been able to tell him what he missed. In the traditional sense, not much. The plot of this movie is, like, teenage boy gets some feminist ideas. But, moment-to-moment, there's such bittersweet warmth suffused into each scene. I can't wait until the film--as busy as Mike Mills's others but not as precious--is chopped up into Youtube clips so that I can autoplay "Abbie Dances 1" into "Abbie Dances 2." Mills's screenplay is obsessed with the 1979 moment it's depicting. When a character quotes from a work--or when MIlls blends something in, like Koyaanisqatsi clips--the details of the piece are superimposed onto the screen. "Jimmy Carter- "Crisis of Confidence Speech, 1979," for example. But that focus on the present is balanced by the rich backstories of the characters (There isn't a less-than-great performance in the bunch.) and even dips into the future. From narration, we find out what happens years later, even how characters die. The device adds a tinge of melancholy to a piece that's, on the whole, funny and jaunty. The climax is a bit of a shrug, more invented than earned, but this is played in my key and tempo exactly. 7. Louder Than Bombs (Joachim Trier) Joachim Trier's English language debut retains the delicate restraint and  warm guidance of his Norwegian films. Like many of my favorite recent works, Louder Than Bombs toggles between the past and present as part of a desperate search for truth, but that inquiry isn't much of a mystery in the traditional sense. The film is too realistic for all of that, and when important revelations do come, they're delivered with a "that's the way of the world" weariness that keeps the film centered. Likewise, the film is remarkably balanced as an ensemble, depicting adolescence, young adulthood, and retirement age with the same fairness and insight. All of that talk of balance makes the film sound sleepy, but it has moments of unique energy as well, particularly the diary collage, which reminded me of something like Roger Avary's European vacation in the middle of Rules of Attraction. My big complaint is that I think, as unkind as this might be to say about a young performer, Devin Druid is kind of a zero in his role--and not in the way the film intends. Still, this is a reflective work that manages to be objective without ever being cold. 6. Knight of Cups (Terrence Malick) To me, this film is about transgressing over lines real and imaginary. There's a scene in which Christian Bale and Natalie Portman are flirting over the do-not-touch line near a sculpture in a museum, and they're playing not just with the physical space but also with their relationship toward each other.That location crystallized all of the paths we had seen before--roads, shores, pools, power lines, tunnels--that lead but also restrict or bound. (The roads in particular, shot from a camera mounted onto the car's fender it seems, are strikingly tactile in a way I haven't seen.) And those physical frontiers prepare us for the abstract lines that the film is really interested in blurring. For example, Bale's Rick is cavorting with two women, and one presses on the ceiling while standing on a bed: It's a moment both adult, because of the necessary height, and child-like, because of the impulse itself. Going deeper, the GoPro shots that seem like a beach memory of childhood are a visual rhyme for the GoPro shots of Cate Blanchett on the beach, tying the two moments together to suggest her purity. To quote the film, which quotes Plato: "The soul remembers the beauty it used to know in heaven." (The two moments exist on the same plane if you want me to extend the geometry language.) The structural tools of the film sometimes contradict that matching, however. It's disorienting when Wes Bentley's dialogue literally interrupts Bale's narration. The interior life is important, but it isn't sacred. What is sacred? Suffering, in a way that a post-Christian world does not understand but that Malick knows. That's the last threat space or border holding people back from transcendence: being grateful for suffering. The Internet wrote about this film with the typical tone of our times: "Poor White man with all of his money and women. Why should we feel sorry for him?" Well, because the line between pleasure and pain is often imperceptible. "Malick doesn't develop the female characters." Well, because the female characters are deliberately mysterious, a more tangible version of the theological faith that eludes Rick. Tellingly, a woman at a party has "faith" tattooed on her shoulderblades. Keep not reading Dante, film writers. Look, Malick's films aren't going to start requiring less of a viewer. They're allusive, elusive, and illusive. I'm not sure he even knows what he's trying to say. If you haven't liked the other post-Days of Heaven works, you won't like this. But aesthetically, he and Emmanuel Lubezki take Los Angeles, the most photographed place on Earth, and make it look new. Philosophically, he's trying to prove, with an ultimately pro-family sentiment, that "to suffer binds you to something higher than yourself, higher than your own will." Get on his level. 5. Moonlight (Barry Jenkins) When the screening ended, three or four people in my vicinity exhaled "Wow." As urgent and rapturous as it is delicate, Moonlight never gives you what you think it's going to give you. I don't mean that only in the sense of "Oh, it subverts cliches of Black American masculinity." (Though, of course, that's true.) I mean that you'll think that you have a handle on something like a symbol until it flourishes into something else. One character wants to make green tea, fills a pot with water, and plants the pot on the stove. (A shaky burner, since this movie understands all of the details of people who are struggling.) So you think that the rolling water on the stove represents the tension of the scene: As the characters dig into each other and reveal the "heat" between them, the water starts to bubble, right? But then you remember a scene from an hour and a half earlier, in which the youngest version of our protagonist poured boiling water into a bubble bath that wouldn't have had hot water otherwise. (Since this movie understands all of the details of people who are struggling.) So then you connect that both of these pots are nourishing the character, guiding him back to his most naked self. That's how rich this film is. And that reminds you of the way the protagonist has consumed aspects of his drug dealer father figure: the way they lick their lips or the crown sitting on their dashboards. Each moment is meaningful, but there's even more heart in what is left unsaid. The heartbreakingly repressed sexuality of the film is a continuum, but so is life. There probably wasn’t a more tender film this year. 4. La La Land (Damien Chazelle) Musicals are, at once, the most artificial genre of cinema and the most pure genre of cinema. Artificial because, yeah, in real life people don't burst into song and dance when they feel intense emotion. If film is about representation, then musicals are dumb. But if film is about serendipity, if its purpose is to conjure a magic that is not a part of our daily lives, then it's all there in the musical. As a marriage of music, dance, theater, and photography, musicals are the most concrete proof that cinema is its own art form, not just a spin on any one of those other mediums. And, on a more theoretical level, the musical acknowledges itself, which is where La La Land comes in. Performers in a musical make extra-diegetic what was only inter-diegetic: They are performing to what should be a wall. The bargain we make with movies is that the performers are pretending they're not being observed, but in a musical, they're performing for only our pleasure. Those two ideas are being held at the same time, and La La Land takes it a step further by adding the layer of ambitious dreams colliding with unforgiving reality. What we want, the dream world in which anything can happen, is often in conflict (but also in strange harmony with) what we accept. When Gosling and Stone are at their happiest together, I caught myself wanting the rest of the film to continue with their being in love. Let's just have an hour of them being cute. But THAT'S NOT HOW MOVIES WORK. I knew that they would have to get into a fight and break up, but the real genius of Chazelle's screenplay is that the fight is as effective as the meet-cute or the first kiss. The former is effective because it's uniquely real; the latter is effective because it's as relatably unreal as being swept off your feet by love. So, especially when it gets to the ending that many people don't get, the film is able to hold two ideas at once. So what I'm saying is: If you don't like La La Land, then it's because you want only representation or only magic, and you will not be pleased by something capable of doing both. You do not like movies. INSTANT CLASSICS

3. Silence (Martin Scorsese) Judging from the box office performance of Silence, there were not many people jacked up about stories of 17th century Jesuits facing the dilemma of apostatizing or being tortured. As a Jesuit-educated Jesuit educator (as a person whose favorite filmmaker is Martin Scorsese, in part because of a shared compulsion toward sacrificial violence), maybe I was always in the tank for this one. Part of a retreat for someone in the Society of Jesus, the holy order of the priests in the film, is St. Ignatius's spiritual exercises, a graduated order of meditations for which the retreatant places himself in Gospel scenes, trying his best to witness Christ with his own senses. This type of immersion can be powerful but also dangerous. It can, if sharply felt, introduce the vague notion that a person actually was there, can speak of Jesus first-hand. It could even conflate the idea of being Christ's disciple with the idea of being Christ. And, of course, that's the paradox of Christianity: The person we're supposed to imitate was not technically a person. He was something more pure than we can ever be. We're praying toward an impossible goal. Andrew Garfield's Rodriguez is given to this type of enthrallment--Scorsese's way of visualizing it is the occasional insert shot of El Greco's The Veil of St. Veronica, which Rodriguez would have prayed through. When he says, "My mouth tastes of vinegar," placing himself as the crucified Jesus, the film goes a step further in posing the conflict between devotion and vanity. Rodriguez and his compatriot Garrpe get captured by the Japanese, and they expect to be executed quickly and made martyrs. But like most formidable opponents of Catholicism, the inquisitors understand the theology completely. They instead keep the men alive to watch the torture of other Christians, and they make it clear that only deference and denunciation from the big fish priests will stop the brutality. (In the process, the priests take on much more of a Judas role than a Jesus one, as Scorsese points out in his foreword to the book.) So we're faced with the idea of service to God being selfish, the idea of humility being perverted to pride. And if something that fundamental about the religion can be turned on its head, then what are we left with? Silence doesn't provide answers--because there aren't any; a decent Catholic acknowledges mysteries beyond his own understanding. But on a minute-to-minute basis, Scorsese presents a dizzying amount of questions. Can anyone, even the most devout, form a reliable conscience? If God is silent, what is the function of prayer? Can faith ever be more public than private? Is private faith without demonstration or good works valuable? In merely asking these questions, Scorsese, not only as a director but as a screenwriter for the first time since 1995, presents the totality of the faith in a way that hasn't been done since Diary of a Country Priest or The Passion of Joan of Arc. A popular reading might be that Silence is the culmination of a career in formalism only. The left-to-right repurposing of a descent down the stairs as an echo of a similar shot in Bringing Out the Dead, let's say. You can take that approach. More forcefully, however, the film feels like a final exhibit in Scorsese's argument for cinema as expiation. The one time Rodriguez feels God's presence is when he is at his most secure. And in that way--I may be talking to the people who escaped to Monster Trucks in January instead of seeing Silence--Scorsese argues that deliverance is too easy. It's more than human beings deserve. Suffering though...you might have something there.

2. Manchester by the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan) You can tell when a movie really matters because, when you're talking about it with someone else who saw it, even the tiniest moments are indelible. Sure, we all know "You talkin' to me," but we also know that shot of Travis in the movie theater looking through his fingers. "This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship," sure. But you remember that guy in the prologue who gets shot in the back as he runs away from his forged papers? When it comes to Manchester by the Sea, there are devastating moments that will be referenced by even people who haven't seen the movie--and the moments, which are often free of dialogue, deserve that reputation. But I can just as easily make a joke about Otto or Godspell. The movie hits on the big swings, but it also knows how Lee would fold his picture frames in a towel while packing them. Good movies get the important stuff right; great movies get everything right. Can you believe that, right now, as I write this, someone paid money to see Rogue One or The Lego Batman Movie or anything else that is just okay? Can you believe that people would skip this because it's "too sad," ignoring not only how funny the film is, but also how enriching sadness itself can be? Manchester by the Sea is about the temptation to choose sadness for yourself, to wallow in suffering, and I guess I didn't learn anything because, if it means that I get more art like this, count me as a member of team sad.

1. O.J.: Made in America (Ezra Edelman) O.J.: Made in America is a house of cards built on spinning plates--if you'll allow me a metaphor as convoluted as O.J. Simpson taking down an American flag in his backyard as his friend tapes it to sell to a tabloid. At first, the breadth of the piece feels daunting, and the unraveling strands of the narrative threaten to overwhelm it. Most of the points are ambitious (Has race been class all along? Is the Trial of the Century a seed that germinated into our current culture of victimhood? Is it possible to transcend race?) and some of the points are obvious. (People who deal memorabilia are scum.) But there are a lot of points. They all pay off so powerfully though. When someone recounts a juror's giving Simpson the Black Power fist--footage we don't have--Edelman slots in the Tommie Smith and John Carlos picture we saw four hours earlier, and now, yeah, it makes sense. Similarly, Danny Bakewell's talking head is first introduced as "Louisiana native," commenting on how African-Americans moved west in the '50s. Five hours later, with the title changed to "civil rights activist," he explains, "I used O.J. for our cause." The film prefers to delve deeper when it could have stayed on the surface. In fact, one of the documentary's greatest challenges is deciding what to explain. In what was already one of the most documented odysseys of recent history, what do we need to be reminded of? What did we never know? For the most part, Edelman handles that judiciously, even if I wanted more on Marcus Allen. What we get is definitive with all of the corners painted in. Sometimes in the middle portion, the sheer level of access took my breath away. How did Edelman get the VHS of Nicole's private memorial service? How did he get the videos of O.J. yelling at the TV (like a White person) on his first day home? The truest test of the balance, however, is that the film runs 7 1/2 hours, and I still didn't want it to end. Some people have complained that Part V feels indulgent, but it's the natural outcome of O.J.'s need to be loved and it's just as good as everything else--even the music, which was negligible otherwise, worked well in the stranger-than-fiction conclusion. Part V shows justice as injustice, the final thread for Edelman to tie. The civil trial and the Vegas trial prove which chickens actually came home to roost.

[lakegenevaslumberparty]

#hes ancient and evil!! hes a rich bitch in a castle lording over the peasants! and theyre New Money from the rising middle class#who acquired their wealth through the hard work of *checks notes* dead mother dead father dead mentor and i guess ambiguous texas methods#lets start the book again but i take a shot for every thematic inconsistency and pass out before Jonathan even meets the count#im being mean but also. dracula is frustrating because any time you think 'oh thats compelling' it gets contradicted two chapters later#yes im aware that inheriting is not equal to waging war but the class lines being delineated are very wonky (OP’s tags) 

Bram Stoker really made a point of the Count hoarding old money in his bedroom like a dragon, the spoils of war and empire guarded by the upper class, just for his heroes to bribe their way across Europe funded by their inheritance from a revolving door of dying parents, huh